On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 11/27/20 (What we are thankful for, USDC in Venezuela, is GBTC behind the rally?) (EP.151)

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Nic and Matt return with a special Thanksgiving issue of OTB. In this episode:  How Castle Island VC was almost Brink VC The difference between financialized walled-garden gold and its Bitcoin equivalent How USDC is being used in Venezuela via AirTM How stablecoins are now tools of geopolitical power projection Vaneck lanches an ETN on the Deutsche Bourse Is GBTC the cause of the rally The OCC proposes fair access to banking services A few people and organizations that we're thankful for Chaincode Labs Bitcoin Optech Greg Schvey and Adam Ludwin Caitlin Long John Pfeffer Fidelity Digital Assets Coin Center Three Arrows and CMS Holdings Should thanksgiving turkey trots be cancelled? Content mentioned in this episode:  Jeremy Rubin's collegiate BTC sweater Adventures in Capitalism, Why this Reflexive Ponzi Scheme will Continue Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Proposed Rule Would Ensure Fair Access to Bank Services, Capital, and Credit Sponsor notes: Withum is a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm committed to helping our clients be more profitable, efficient and productive in today's complex business environment. Our Digital Currency group is proud to partner with members of the cryptocurrency community. Get to know us at withum.com/crypto.

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. So today's episode is brought to you by Witham, a top 25, accounting and audit firm. More on them later. You have a wish we're doing this on YouTube. You were wearing all Bitcoin gear right now. That's right.

So Jeremy Rubin is selling these Bitcoin sweaters. They're in my, I guess my Twitter equivalent of a Snapchat story, fleet. I put them into fleet. So it's like a collegiate sweater with the Bitcoin logo on. And I also have, it's a pretty great hat, which comes from Zubi's store. Shout out Zubi, which I think the link for that is Bitcoin Movement.com. They have some really cool stuff. It's just terrible Opsack for you to be wearing that, just walking through the city of Boston with just Bitcoin plastered all over yourself.

I'm a sacrificial lamb for the cause. I got to spread the message at all costs. Well, it was a big content week. John Newberry came on the podcast, and he stole the name of our podcast for his new nonprofit organization. Yeah. I mean, it's okay. Great minds think alike and so on.

But, yeah, we were the first thing called, well, we weren't the first, we were probably the first Bitcoin-related thing called Brink. Maybe not. I haven't checked. Little known fact is, Hassel Island Ventures was almost called Brink VC. Yeah. So I was lobbying hard for that and I was cruelly shut down.

But that would have been a really, really great name, really funny, original. It was a call back to the white paper. And instead we're just named after a place now. No hard feelings. No hard feelings. I didn't, for the record, there's a broader story here that I did not shut it down. You could have gone to bat for Brink more. There's a little bit of inside baseball here.

You didn't stick your neck out for Brink. There was a lot of names tossed around. I mean, some really creative names as well. I want to do Starling VC, which is like, you know, starlings are those birds that murmurate, and they have this emergent consensus, basically. So it's like a really funny, clever biological Bitcoin analogy. Turns out there's already a Starling VC. All the VC names are taken.

They're all taken. Yeah, they're all taken. So that episode was really great, I thought, not to talk up the show or anything, but John is, he's a relative newcomer to Bitcoin Core development, believe it or not. Even though it feels like he's been around forever, he, you know, broke in to Bitcoin Core. And I always use John Newberry as an example for why Bitcoin Core isn't this closed technocracy. Like, they do accept new, fresh blood in, provided that you sort of meet the standard. And John's own experience totally validates that. And it is a data point against this notion that Bitcoin Core is sort of this elite technocracy.

So that was one interesting thing we talked about. Of course, I'm really psyched that there's more Bitcoin funding organizations, more decentralization. The reality of Bitcoin funding is so different today than it was back when really Blockstream and the MITDCI were the two main organizations. organizations. It's so different and in an incredibly healthy place, I would say. And then you had a busy content week. You went on the Pomp podcast and then last Friday after we taped, you went on the Laura Shin podcast. Yeah, actually, Lora Shin, Pomp, and Bloomberg was all back to back in the same afternoon. Crazy. What a content day. That was a real content day. And it was pretty white by the end of it. I don't know how Pomp does it. Pomp's had like five episodes this week. Yeah, Pomp does the content days. So when I filmed with him, I think I was the third one of that day with him. Why don't we hop into some deals? Yeah, so we've got a Castle Island deal to start. Notabene. So it's a new deal that we led. They are a compliance software firm for exchanges and virtual asset service providers. They raised $1.7 million.

dollars from us, GreenVisor Capital, Linette Capital, Dialectic, and others. Yeah, really excited about Notabene. Travel Rule is something that's been discussed a lot in this industry, and it's something that pretty clearly is going to start being enforced by regulators across the world, really. So Notabene has a solution that enables exchanges and brokerages and financial services firms to quickly come in compliance with the travel rule. And I think it's also kind of a misunderstanding. rule. You know, this is no part of this is trying to prevent users from being able to withdraw

self-sovereign custody solutions. There's no part of this that is going after hosted wallets. This is purely to allow financial services firms to actually just get in compliance the way that they are for other asset classes. Yeah, and as it turns out, the travel rule is actually not even a new thing. It's actually existed for a pretty long time. And it's just that the the financial regulators finally realized that no crypto businesses have been complying with it. And they just gave the industry a bit of a warning shot and a hurry up. And it's one of those things that you can't wish into non-existence. It's here.

And we need firms that are going to help exchanges basically deal with it. Yeah, the way I kind of think about this is, you know, some parts of the industry are very vocal, against things that are promoting this travel rule. And look, I get that. And there's been some good reasons for some of that pushback over the years. So some of the startups in the space that were going after that use case were actually trying to make changes to Bitcoin itself, like to implement memo fields that would allow users to be identified within transactions. And that would have, of course, required hard forks. And that was never going to be something that got through. And that was the wrong way to think about it. But the way that I kind of think of,

but it is Bitcoin and other public blockchains are really just free and open platforms, and people can use them however they want. So if you want to use them in the context of storing your keys on a hardware wallet or a paper wallet and doing physical exchanges peer-to-peer, more power to you. Financial Services firms are going to want to hold these assets the way they hold other assets, and they're going to want to know what's the reference rate of the asset at the end of the month, at the end of the day. They're going to want to know who their customers are.

They want to know where the assets are going. So this just kind of falls into that bucket of financial services firms are going to hold these assets. And they're going to need solutions that put them in compliance with their local regulators. Yeah. And one thing to remember here is I think people think about what happened with gold and they expect that the same thing would happen to Bitcoin. So there's no porous member in between financialized gold and actual sort of non-investment gold. it's very costly and difficult to get gold from non-walled garden into the wild garden like London Bullion Market Association. So the barrier is impermeable. But with Bitcoin, you know,

there's no additional verification required. You don't have to smelt Bitcoin into new bars or anything. So I think it will continue to be a permeable barrier between the Bitcoin held in the sort of the exchange context and Bitcoin's held by individuals. So I think, think people are using some of these analogies to reason about Bitcoin being trapped in the kind of lit markets and not making it out. I think it's kind of a different situation. We've good reason to believe that it would still kind of flow freely between the lit markets and the sort of like not not as highly regulated space. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Staying in that kind of same type of category, so chain analysis, the blockchain forensics firm, really market leading firm,

announced that they've raised $100 million in a series C round led by addition and with participation from benchmark, Excel, and Ribbet amongst others. So what a round? I mean, that's a, Chenelis is a real monster of an enterprise software business at this point. The latest crypto unicorn, right? Yeah, definitely. So it was done at a billion dollar valuation, according to the article that I saw. So a billion dollars peri on a hundred million dollar round.

And, you know, Chanelsis was one of these companies that, that the business model is just very beautiful, really. So they start with kind of having this nice wedge with regulators and law enforcement and selling software into those folks. And, you know, what will happen is investigations will start to occur. FBI, all sorts of other countries, law enforcement officials will be digging into this data and they'll send subpoenas and requests to exchanges and they'll identify, you know, suspicious activity, and they'll ask the exchanges to produce data.

on the transactions. And, you know, those exchanges, if they don't have something like chain aliasis running, they're going to have to do a lot of manual work to actually get to the bottom of what the regulator or the law enforcement official is asking for. And so they end up, you know, buying chain alias as well. And so you have that kind of virtuous loop there. It's a really great business model. Yeah, it's a joggernaut.

The next deal we have is Globe, which is a crypto derivatives exchange. They raised $3 million from Penton. Nara, Y Combinator, Tim Draper, and some others. Derivatives exchanges. Still so hot right now. All year long. Let's take a quick break to hear about our sponsors with them. If you listen to this show before, you know that we take accounting pretty seriously.

And you might think that's a little strange in the context of digital assets. But whenever there are trust relationships or centralized counterparties, that's where these firms become relevant. I think the industry is in a good place. it pertains to these accounting firms with specific digital asset practices. Today's sponsor is witham one such firm. They are a top 25 accounting and advisory firm in the United States. They have a digital currency and blockchain group with experience navigating tax, legislative changes, managing token sales, and managing stable coin audits, which is pretty critical. To contact their team, go to witham.com slash crypto. That's WITHU M.

dot com slash crypto. A bunch of interesting stories on the news front this week. So let's talk about the Circle announcement. Did you see this one? I thought this was huge. Yeah. And by the way, you know, this whole sector, this whole category, we've been covering it in depth in this podcast, the Cryptodolarization miniseries.

We had, in fact, we had Jeremy Lair on the show. And Airtm, which is the other counterparty in this story, we had Ribbon Galindo on the show. So, you know, you want to learn about crypto dollarization. We've done the canonical miniseries. It's all there. We have, but why don't you tee it up for folks that didn't see this story? So this is so interesting, and we talked about this exact thing with Rubin on the show. So basically, the Juan Guaido administration is effectively competing with the Maduro administration in Venezuela for legitimacy, right?

So in the eyes of the United States, Maduro has de facto power, but Guaido has de jure power, right? So the U.S. currently considers Guaido to be the sort of fairly elected, valid president in Venezuela. And sort of in practice, Maduro actually has power in that country. So there are a bunch of Venezuelan funds, kind of state funds, in the U.S. banking system, and the Treasury seized them. And what they were doing in their mind is returning them to the sort of rightful owner of their funds, which is the Guaido administration. And so then the Treasury went to Guaido and said, well, what do you want to do with this U.S. dollars that belong to your administration, they're part of your budget? And Guaido said, well, why don't we just donate them to health care

workers on the ground in Venezuela? So that's all great. The question is, and Venezuela, by the way is partially dollarized, almost fully dollarized at this point with physical dollars for the most part. Then the question is, how do you connect the banking system in the United States to Venezuela because banks don't operate. U.S. banks do not operate in Venezuela, right? They don't have corresponding banking relationships with Venezuelan banks at all. So there is a crypto startup called Airtm. They provide kind of digital dollar IOUs and wallets, and they use a kind of a local Bitcoin style exchange to get liquidity against the Bolivar, right? And so Airtm became the access point to distribute

these dollars. And so that was the story until recently, and then last week it came out that Circle was going to deliver these dollars in USDC format via Airtm. So the flow would be that the USDC are minted using, you know, the Guaido administration mints USDC with Circle and then sends them to AirTM and then Airtem converts them into AirUSD, and then the AirUSD can then be converted into Balavars on the ground to buy things with because there's kind of a dual currency regime in Venezuela right now. So that's a lot, a little bit confusing, but basically Circle is now, in USDC is becoming relevant in geopolitics, as we expected, you know, this global dollarization event through crypto rails is basically happening. So it's interesting. There's a lot to dig into there. Let's talk for a second about why this wouldn't be possible without public blockchain infrastructure.

You know, so the first thing that comes to mind is just what you said about the banking apparatus in the United States. So no U.S. bank would have the ability to go service an individual on the ground in Venezuela. It just wouldn't be something that they could do from a regulatory perspective. Wow. Wow. They totally could. They just choose not to. That's better said.

There's not something that their risk management groups would allow, but there's probably nothing outright. legal about that. Yeah, there's nothing legally stopping banks from doing business in Venezuela. The sanctions are on members of the regime, not on ordinary Venezuelans. However, the compliance and the, you know, the risk is such that no banks really want to do business in Venezuela. And so with public blockchain infrastructure, it's really anyone that can set up a wallet can have access to USC here. So we're really seeing the power of this technology. And I think it's, It's really fascinating that the U.S. government is using the U.S. dollar on blockchain infrastructure as almost a foreign policy tool.

Yeah, and there's nothing insidious about it. The Venezuela is already effectively dollarized. The Maduro regime decriminalized dollars in Venezuela earlier this year as a palliative measure as a way to win back the support of their people because they're getting really upset the dollar transactions were criminalized, especially as the Bolivar inflated away to almost nothing. However, there is a catch in the story, though, which is that there's not really any merchants in Venezuela that accept USC today. So it's not a full closed loop system from, you know, the Fed to USDC to merchants in Venezuela, where people can spend their USC that they're receiving.

Those merchants are still, some of them using physical dollars, so you can use Zell, something like that, and some of them you still use Bolivars. So there does need to be that point of egress from USDC to sort of local currency options. Yeah, and I know that Circle is working on a number of wallet APIs and things that could be used by merchants. So I'd have to believe that that is going to be kind of quickly on the horizon here if it's not already in place. on the ground. Well, the merchant would need to become comfortable with holding, denominating commerce in USDC terms, which then introduces the additional problem of, will they be able to pay suppliers in USDC? So you can't just install one link in that supply chain and convert it into USDC. You kind of have to flip the whole system at once. Yeah, being an FX broker

in Venezuela might be a kind of a lucrative thing to be right now. Yeah, the interesting thing is that Airtium, the Maduro government wasn't happy about Guaido doing this distribution. And so they sort of banned Airtm, they banned app, or they banned the website. And so it's, it's becoming more complex and it's kind of a cat and mouse game. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. But either way, I mean, really fascinating experiment playing out right now. Yeah, good for Circle. I mean, Jeremy O'Leary's been talking about the Internet of Value for so long here. And this is, you know, textbook example. So this is terrific. Yeah, and what I like is that Circle's not afraid to wait into these situations. And it would have been very easy for them to say, well, because there's

sanctions against certain individuals in Venezuela, we want nothing to do with the whole country. But they're more interested in harm reduction and giving everyday Venezuelan's access to the dollar, which is really important. Next story of the week is Van Eck, which is the New York-based investment management firm, ETF focused company. They have launched a Bitcoin exchange traded note on the Deutsche Bors. So more and more listed products happening outside the United States. We need to put an end to the U.S. not having these listed products. It's honestly getting embarrassing now. There's so many of these products trading in other jurisdictions at NAV, you know, at par. And meanwhile, the U.S. is in the dark ages. And we, you know, there's, you know, there's,

the regulators aren't letting us put through just a functional ETF product. I don't know if you've picked up on this, but from the last cycle back in 2017, you had a lot of these articles around, hey, the only reason that the Bitcoin price is going up is because of tether and tether is a fraud and all this stuff.

And everyone started sending those around. This cycle, I think it's going to want to be GBT, and people just freaking out about the premium on GBT and all the interesting trades that hedge funds are doing in terms of borrowing and creating it nav. And there's like one article floating out there that's basically just saying Bitcoin's only pumping because of GBTC, which I think is kind of crazy.

Yeah, it's similar. I mean, there's still plenty of tether fad circulating, by the way. And if you want to read a rebuttal to that, read my latest piece on Medium. I talk about tether in there. I referenced a couple academic papers that looked at the same exact period and additional periods and found that there was no relationship between Tether issuance and

the Bitcoin price. So, you know, I don't put a lot of stock in that critique. But it's the same kind of critique in that I think it really gets it backwards. Tether's growth was due to Bitcoin exchanges growing their balance sheet and they're needing more dollars to transact with their clients. And that's what caused the structural rate of Tether growth. In 2017, we talked about it with Dan Matashevsky on this podcast, famous episode of the podcast. And this is kind of the same. The GBDC growth is due to Bitcoin becoming more attractive as an asset class. And all of these investors that need to hold Bitcoin in a tax advantage way or on a brokerage, they need an instrument to get exposure to Bitcoin. The only way they can do that is GBDC right now. So I don't

think you can credibly allege that a financial product giving exposure to the underlying is the cause of the whole market rally. I mean, it's certainly an element. We see the seasonality in Bitcoin price. The positive returns are stronger during weekdays and during business hours. So there's a set of sort of U.S.-based buyers that are moving the needle there. There's so many other ways to get exposure to Bitcoin aside from just GBDC. I don't really buy that it's just the story of one product. No, it's certainly not. I mean, you see all other types of metrics that would lead you to believe that there are large

institutional allocators getting involved here. So assets under management at the custodians, open interest on the derivatives contracts, they're all kind of up into the right. So this is not a monocausal phenomenon here. So this was maybe the most exciting and cool. thing I saw last week. And of course, it had to do with bank policy. That's always, that's always exciting and cool. So by the way, we're going to do a whole series on this. I just recorded the first episode on this series today. So if you didn't know what Operation Choke Point was before,

you're going to learn. And it's a really critical and dare I say dark chapter in our nation's history, which my conspiracy is it's still ongoing, but we'll get into that later. Anyway, so the OCC, which we talk about more and more, it seems by the week, under Brian Brooks, proposed a rule to ensure fair access to banking services provided by national banks. And you might say, well, why do you need a rule like this? You know, why do you need to stipulate the banks don't discriminate in who they provide services to. The reason is, historically, you go back about 10 years, there's this whole episode where the FDIC and the DOJ pressured banks not to do business with entire industries.

And these are not the most salubrious industries in the world. We're talking about firearms manufacturers, payday lenders, you know, porn businesses. like marginal stuff. But, you know, nevertheless, there was no sort of illegal activity that was the cause of the banks sort of de-platforming them. It was just because the government was sort of opposed to the existence of those industries. And they were using the FDIC as a lever to deprive them and deprive them of access to banking. And so this kind of proposed rule from the OCC seeks to basically reverse that and prevent that from happening ever again. And we all know that the crypto industry has been the victim of this too. I mean, it's very,

very clear that, you know, virtually every firm we interact with has been, you know, has had a hard time getting banking. So to me, this is immensely positive. And it would undo some of those historical wounds where there was structural deprivation of access to banking and credit for entire industries. So I was pretty excited about this. Yeah, that's fascinating. Brian Brooks has done so much in six months here. It's crazy.

Very productive stint. We'll see who gets the next chairmanship of the OCC. Hasn't he been nominated to kind of stick around? He has been, but the policy wonks in the On the Brink podcast community are telling me that that's unlikely to be. approved. This is such a dramatic measure that he would be taking, in that case, is a lame doc, so to speak.

I hope it goes through. I mean, I don't know how you can be against banks, you know, being fair in terms of who they provide services to, but I could be surprised. Well, that bank lobby is a pretty nefarious group. You remember that blog post they had a few weeks ago about Crackin and the critiques of the Wyoming thing? You know, they've got a... Yeah, they really didn't like it.

Deep pockets and very intellectually dishonest group. This is what we're up against. We got to redouble our lobbying activities. We need the crypto lobby to kick in a high gear here. Yeah, where's that crypto lobby? We've, you know, we got Coin Center. We got the chamber. Yeah, that's true.

It is Thanksgiving. You know, maybe we should take this time to think about who we're thankful for in the crypto community. Okay, very wholesome, very heartwarming of you. So why don't you go first? All right, I'm going to go first. I'm going to go with Chaincode Labs. I think this is an organization that really flies below the radar, but is very instrumental in sponsoring a great deal of Bitcoin Core development, bringing in new contributors to the project. Chain Code Labs is founded by Suhas Doftor and Alex Morcos. And really just two of the most kind of unsung heroes. in the industry. So doing a ton to promote the development of the project, doing a ton to get more eyes on the code. And really doesn't, you know, they don't get a ton of credit. But I think that they are

doing really necessary work in the community. All right. Along those lines, I'm going to go with Bitcoin Optech. And I was reminded of Bitcoin Optech when I was talking to John Newbery. But they are so, so underrated. They basically talk to exchange. and they tell them about the latest changes in the Bitcoin protocol and how to integrate them, how to use Segwit, that they give them suggestions about being good and honest and users of the Bitcoin blockchain, so they're not taking up too much block space in terms of batching. I believe Bitcoin Optech was founded by John Newbray and Steve Lee, unless I'm mistaken, and super below the radar.

but they just quietly move the needle and they connect the technical community to the exchanges, which is super vital. That's a good one. I like that one a lot. Let's keep doing them. All right. I'm going to throw a couple out there. So I think that a big kind of category of unsung heroes for the whole industry are really the

wave of entrepreneurs that introduced Bitcoin and Ethereum and crypto assets for the very first time to big financial firms back in like 2014 and 15. And this was when most of these firms were not even in R&D mode yet, just really trying to learn about this stuff. And so two that come to mind are Greg Chavez from Tradeblock, now also with Exxoni and Adam Ludwin from chain.com, which back then was a Bitcoin API company and had a couple pivots along the way and eventually sold to Stellar. But this wave of entrepreneur that kind of came in and did a lot of the heavy lifting to get some of these firms just knowledgeable about it. And not that they got them to the point where they were all deploying products and building custody right away, but they were really important to senior leadership getting tuned in. And Greg and Adam in particular, I think were two voices that really resonated with a lot of senior leaders at big banks and asset management firms.

All right. So everybody knows I'm a fan of this person already, but definitely thankful for the work that Kailen Long has done in the last year. you know, her work has taken me on an intellectual journey where I learned about concepts that I never thought I would learn about, like bailment, accounting concepts, notions of custody, interesting banking directions. You know, I'm thankful she came on the show as well, which is obviously a great episode. But also the fact that she moved the needle at the state and potentially national level, help push through this legislation in Wyoming, which turned Wyoming into the most interesting. state in America. And we've now done three or four episodes just on businesses in Wyoming. But she's actually dramatically changing the banking landscape in this country, which I think people don't understand the effect that banks kind of have on the fabric of society and the negative

effects of a really closed and oligopolistic banking industry. And, you know, I find her work pretty inspiring, honestly. So thankful for Kaelan Long. That's a good one. And I say it all the time, but we need to get out to Wyoming and do some sort of a festival once this COVID thing's over. Yeah. Do you have another one? Yeah. So my next one would be John Feffer. You know, he's, I don't know if he's one of these people that a lot of people know about, but certainly someone who has, you know, put something in terms of contribution into the public domain that I think has been very impactful with his institutional investors take on crypto assets, which was published, I think, back in December of 2017. And it was one of these things that as soon as it kind of popped on the scene, I remember

reading it and just being like, okay, that lightball moment kind of went off for me in terms of how to appraise these public blockchain networks with a real investor's discipline. And even to the point where I'm surprised at how few people have actually read that paper over time. I was on the phone with someone who was kind of a very successful traditional asset management person the other day. And we're talking about utility tokens and file storage networks and how you would think about applying a valuation technique to those. And I found myself referencing John's paper and sent it to him afterwards.

So it's one of those things that I think you can continue to go back on. It holds up remarkably well. The other thing to sit to note on John is that he, you know, donates to Bitcoin developers. He's a supporter of a lot of these development organizations. So he's really active with his capital in supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem in not always visible ways, but he is ever present. So even though he's not that public, you know, he did our podcast once, which was great.

But he's, you know, pretty retiring, but super active in Bitcoin behind the the scenes. Yeah, absolutely. My next one would be our former colleagues. Well, we weren't colleagues exactly, but the folks at Fidelity Digital Assets, they are obviously moving the needle a huge amount. I think somewhat underappreciated. Everyone knows Fidelity is active in the industry, but just making custody solvable and being that familiar face on the other side. of the custody equation for a lot of these allocators totally moves the needle. So thankful for them. Yeah, that's a good one. There's definitely when crossing the kind of chasm or the troth of disillusionment, whatever you want to call it from 2016-17,

it's kind of remarkable that Fidelity stayed the course and was able to bring that product to market. So definitely agree with that one. All right. My last one is going to be Coin Center. I think that this has been a group that has been really fighting for the industry in both public and private ways for quite a while. So dating back to when it was founded, I think, back in 2014. So Jerry and Robin and Peter and Naraj have all done such a great job over there and really fighting. Fighting in like the private rooms where these fights need to be fought in order to explain this technology to regulators in order to make sure. that crazy things don't happen from a legislative perspective. So they deserve a lot of credit. And they also, you know, they're worthy of support and consideration. I think if you're a company in this industry, they're really fighting the good fight over there. So thankful for them.

All right. So the last cohort has provided me with a huge amount of entertainment and just new knowledge that I didn't have this year. So I'm going to put them in the same bucket, although obviously they're different organizations. So three arrows, Kyle and Suzu and CMS. They have just kept me entertained this year. They obviously had great years. I mean, DFI was a big, big kind of success for both of those firms. And they aren't shy about sharing their opinions on the industry.

And, you know, we're not really traders, but, you know, we're active in the markets. I've learned so much from the principles of those firms, and I'm thankful for them. Yeah, thank God for Twitter, right? What a great medium for those two groups. It really changed for the better of the day Dan joined Twitter. Oh, my goodness. And when he started doing podcasts, too. So that could be a recurring segment. We could do that once a year on Thanksgiving, or we could do that every now and then if people like it. Maybe we'll do like an airing of grievances at some point, too, a little, little sign.

Seinfeld reference that I'm sure you're not going to pick up on. I never watched Seinfeld. What can I say? But yeah, I mean, that's like every week on the podcast. We air our grievances. So what's on top for Thanksgiving food in the Carter household? What do you have to look forward to? We're actually not going to do a turkey.

We're going to do like a bunch of, what are like the small chickens called, like Cornish Huns? Really? Yeah. So we're not doing a turkey. We're doing Cornish Huns. everything else would be like the classic Thanksgiving dishes. And what's the logic behind the no turkey? Turkeys are just really annoying to cook. Very technical thing to cook. Yeah, not that much fun. And so you're a big road race on Thanksgiving morning guy. And I guess that's not in the cards.

Big time. But we are doing our own. Yeah, there's like a classic road race in my neighborhood called the Turkey Chase. We're just going to organize a much smaller version. But you got to run on Thanksgiving morning. Got to do it. One of my favorite things to do, and it just doesn't make sense that you have to have a cancellation of a road race, there's only like 100 people running a Thanksgiving turkey trot. That's dangerous talk, Matt. That sounds like COVID denial. Facebook is going to be censoring you any moment now. Yeah, I mean, you can still keep like six feet away.

I mean, I'm usually in the front anyway, next. Six feet in front. That's right. That's right. For context, Matt, I've come to understand that Matt actually was a competitive runner in college. Is that correct? This is true. I ran cross-country in track in college.

That was a while ago. I did two years of cross-country in high school. I was really bad at it, and I hated it. I was the captain of the debate club, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Yeah, that's a surprising thing right there, yeah. That was my sport debate. What do we have next week for podcasts?

So we'll have Pele-Brenegard, the founding CEO of Notabene on Monday, And I think we're going to do a couple podcasts next week. Yeah, we have a Swiss crypto bank on Wednesday, Cignam, the founder of that company. So really, really interesting episode. All right. Well, that's it. We're recording this before Thanksgiving.

So hopefully nothing crazy happens like a, you know, Bitcoin ETF approval or something like that. You'll be hearing this on Friday morning, presumably. Maybe we'll have an all-time high before this episode airs. Who knows? It's possible. So everyone have a safe and healthy Thanksgiving, and we'll see you on Monday. THE PRESIDENT.